User blog:Time Guardian/Top 11 Worst Doctor Who Episodes (new series, 1-5).
Doctor Who has been around for almost half a century and with 30+ seasons worth of episodes it’s kind of hard to say for certain what are the worst stories ever produced. And seeing how I’m mostly unfamiliar with the classic series but I’ve thoroughly memorised the new series. I’ve decided to do a top 11 worst stories of the revived series of Doctor Who (Series 1-5). “Why top 11?” It’s because I have a special episode which I’ll want to kill with a shovel. Number 11 - Aliens of London/World War Three After the good pilot that was “Rose”, the okay story that was “The End of the World”, and the alright history piece that was “The Unquiet Dead” we’ve got the 11th worst story the new series had to offer. This episode has the stupidest looking villains ever, production values that are all over the place, acting which ranges from awesome to s**t, comedy scenes that just pop out of nowhere, and overall this two-part episode is just a giant ball composed if 11 different types of bad. There are a good moments like part one’s cliff-hanger, the destruction of 10, Downing Street, the ending was nice, the crash scene was good but there’s just no saving this piece of crap. This episode gets 4/10 and that’s me being generous. But don’t worry. The nightmare has only just begun. Number 10 - Boom Town I have no idea just how much stupidity went into making this script. I mean that this episode is the most uninteresting, unexciting and unfunny episode ever. I mean that absolutely nothing interesting happens, we have an ambiguously gay male secretary passing as the mandatory homosexual person in RTD’s scripts, a bad joke followed by another bad joke and another bad joke, and a dumb chase scene, a revelation that there was a two-word sentence trying to pass off as a story arc throughout this series, a stupid and completely unfunny comedic dinner scene and for desert – a completely unexciting climax to an already boring episode. There’s also uninteresting drama but nobody cares. 4/10. Number 9 - The Vampires of Venice This episode is a rip-off of another episode written by the same writer. Remember in “The Impossible Astronaut”/”Day of the Moon” in which Steven Moffat ripped off the concepts of message being ferried through time (form “The Pandorica Opens”), a tape recording of a child (from “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances”), and finally the perfect prison concept (from “The Pandorica Opens”/”The Big Bang”) all of these episodes were written by him but that was justifiable because the Two-parter was awesome anyway, also there’s a difference between reusing the elements, and ripping them off. The episode borrows so many elements from “School Reunion” that I can’t possibly list them all in this review but I’m gonna list most of them. *We have the bad aliens who look nothing like humans but are able to perfectly disguise themselves as humans because of science-y stuff. *Both alien villains use a school as their base of operations. *Both alien villains use children (late-teens in this episode’s case) to further their goals. *The leader of the aliens offers the Doctor an alliance in both episodes. *The aliens’ plan is foiled with a flick of a switch in both episodes. *Both species are higher up on the food chain than we are (if you know what I mean). *There’s an explosion that decimates the aliens in both episodes. *And the list goes on to number 1243... I could’ve been able to overlook the reuse of plot elements if the writer didn’t reuse so much of them that it became more obvious than the fact that Jack Harkness is bisexual. And even if we get past this complete rip-off of an episode the story is just stupid, the fact that only the male offspring survived the journey to Earth is way too convenient, especially when the crack in time that you used to travel here is harmless (for the most part). I’ve found the comedy scenes more annoying than funny (and I have no idea why to be honest), the fight scene between Rory and that vampire (whose character is basically like a cross between anyone of the three musketeers, and the world’s lamest henchman) was just lame. To give the episode credit where it’s due the ending was just chilling (no I’m not talking about the “I’ve got my spaceship” line) and it really made me even more determined to see what’s really happening with the universe and what the Silence is. Despite some cool moments this episode is a disaster in any respect. The comedy sucks, the action’s lame, the drama is nonexistent, nothing about this episode works. Final Score: 3/10. Number 8 - New Earth (Special Pick) This is the episode that I want to kill with a shovel. The story sucks, the acting’s all over the place, the action ends up actually being funny instead of engaging, while the genuine “komedy” ends up being annoying (I just don’t find the lift/shower scene funny at all). The plot itself is a joke as well as the fact that the Doctor and the possessed Rose just so happen to be right next to the lever which can open every single pod containing every single person who in turn are ill with every single disease. That’s the lever equivalent to the ‘do not touch’ button, it there just there to propel the story while in real life the button is more pointless than trying to calculate the number Pi to the 1,000,000,000 digit, it’s not gonna make any positive difference as Pi is an endless non-recurring decimal, in fact it’s gonna make a negative difference by you wasting your time trying to find the end of an endless number. It’s by far the worst series opener in the revived series and there’s really nothing much to say. It’s an embarrassing exit to an embarrassing villain. 3/10. Number 7 - The Unicorn and the Wasp Where the hell do I begin with this episode? I mean it’s just awful. I know that they’ve tried to make a light-hearted episode but mixing comedy and crime fiction is a bad idea. The story that was intended to be a sci-fi explanation of Agatha Christie’s disappearance ended up making no sense on so many levels. The series basically reached a new low of stupidity with this episode but one tremendously stupid moment isn’t equal to an entire episode of stupid but we’ll get that later. The comedy in this episode is so unfunny that even Benny Hill won’t make it work. Let’s make a list of all comedic scenes that failed to be funny. *The bad joke at the start of the episode. *The intentionally funny interrogation scenes. *The intentionally funny “the crime has been solved” scene. *THAT STUPID, STUPID GAY JOKE!!! *The “detox” scene. *The flashback scene *There’s probably more comedy-less scenes but this episode was so bad that I forgot most of it already (now that’s a self-preservation instinct). The next problem that I have with the episode is the title “The Unicorn and the Wasp”, and the titular villains “the Unicorn” who’s so underdeveloped that I’m not gonna mention her again and “the Wasp” who’s by far the most contrived villain in the new series, so this episode is NOT gaining any points for effective villains. To summarise it: the story’s a mess the villains are abysmal, the comedy sucks, and the ending is just impossibly stupid. 2/10. Number 6 - Gridlock﻿ In case you’ve failed to notice I’ve called every single one of the episodes above stupid. Unfortunately “Gridlock” is even more so. I’m simply amazed at the utter idiocy of the people in the lower city. If travelling on foot is faster than travelling by car then why the hell do you have to travel by car if you’re gonna get stuck in the biggest gridlock ever!?!?! Furthermore if there’s barely enough room for the cars to fly then how can new cars squeeze in??? And let’s not forget that no one has seen any police car or anything like that all of their life and for some reason find it perfectly normal, as well as the fact that all exits to the upper city are closed for no reason along with the air vents whose purpose is to clear the motorway of toxic gasses. JUST HOW STUPID ARE THESE GUYS!?!?! IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!!!!! IT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!!!!! RUSSELL T DAVIES I’M GONNA KILL YOU, YOU F... (30 minutes later) I apologise for that outrage, I just have zero tolerance for writers THAT THINK WE ARE SO STUPID THAT THEY THINK THEY’LL GET AWAY WITH WRITING BULLSH... (2 hours later) throat RUSSELL T DAVIES YOU... (10 hours later) deeply I’m cool, I’m fine now, so in conclusion: the premise is idiotic at best, the Macra are a fan service that nobody cares about, the performances are just awful and I wasn’t enjoying any moment of this episode, only the beginning and the end made me at least somewhat interested in the episode but the same can’t be said for the other 40 minutes of bulls**t. I’ve got 5 more episodes to talk about and I’m already contemplating suicide, so ignore the order of episodes from here on because I don’t think I’m sane enough to number them properly. 2/10. Number 5 - The Idiot's Lantern I’m sitting this one out due to reasons of inability to regain my lucidity after talking about “Gridlock” (yet). 2/10. Number 4 - The Long Game Damn it Russell T Davies you’re not a bad writer so stop showing up on this top 11! I can’t believe that I have to talk about this filler of an episode so I will only summarise it: Acting’s over the top goofy, the villains are moronic, science takes a back seat to ludicrous plot developments, and the story’s only purpose is to find a reason for the Doctor to get rid of a companion that literally came aboard the TARDIS just an episode ago. 1/10. Number 3 - Amy's Choice You know, I’m starting to sense a pattern in the series. Every 7th episode of every series so far (apart from “A Good Man Goes to War” because that episode was awesome) can be found on this top 11 list. Also there’s a pattern as to how these episodes suck: we have a contrived or spoiled villain, an uninteresting premise or setting, bad science, over-the-top acting by at least one cast member, and an anti-climax. There, I just summed up the episode. 1/10. Number 2 - Midnight DAMN YOU RUSSELL T DAVIES!!!! (2 minutes later) For some reason Russell T Davies’ stories keep showing up on my top 11, and I don’t know why. It’s clear that he can write when he wants to (Casanova, The Second Coming, “Bad Wolf/”The Parting of the Ways”, “Army of Ghosts”/”Doomsday”) but why does he keep writing this crap? By now you’re most definitely convinced that I’ve lost my mind and I’m criticising RTD’s stories because he’s gay. That will NEVER be the case. I won’t care even if Mark Gatiss get’s a sex-change operation so long as he/she writes stories that are good (I might get a little shocked but that’s not gonna change the way I look at them as writers). Bear in mind that I’ve seen “The Long Game” and “Midnight” before I discovered that he’s gay and that didn’t change the way I felt about his stories not one bit. “Midnight” is basically a story went wrong. The characters are one-dimensional at best, the villain comes off as annoying, I was amazed again at the levels of stupid to which the characters sank to, did they honestly failed to notice that Sky was still possessed, I could have seen it the second she said “I think it’s letting me go” just by the way she said it. As I said it’s a story went wrong and the time has come to look at the very definition of worst. This episode get’s 1/10 but the next episode doesn’t even deserve this. Welcome to the hellhole that is Chris Chibnall’s “42”. Number 1 - 4-F***ING-2 And there it is folks, the worst story of the series so far – “42”. Personally considered to be the most idiotic, most over the top, most scientifically inaccurate, and most uninteresting episode of Doctor Who to ever have been put to film. Words can’t describe just how moronic it is, just watch every single scene at least 3 times in a row until you realize just how awful it really is. I really want to get this over with as I doubt my sanity will survive much more of this. So what can I say? It’s f***ing awful. 0/10. Conclusion - I hate those episodes read the heading while I hang myself with my school uniform tie. Category:Blog posts Category:Reviews